Palestinian Teaches Tolerance via Holocaust

Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi has led an effort to teach Palestinians at universities in the West Bank about the Holocaust.CreditCreditMichal Luczak/Anzenberger

By Matthew Kalman | The Chronicle Of Higher Education

April 20, 2014

JERUSALEM — Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi is an unlikely advocate for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. He trained as a guerrilla with the Palestine Liberation Organization, was banned from Israel for 25 years because of his prominent role in Yasir Arafat’s Fatah group, and still refers to Israelis as “my enemy.”

But Mr. Dajani, now the library director and a professor of American studies at Al-Quds University, in East Jerusalem, has become a prominent activist for tolerance.

In 2007, he founded Wasatia (“moderation” in Arabic), a group that promotes the Muslim tradition of compromise and nonviolence. His chosen path has already led him to a lonely stand opposing an academic boycott of Israel supported by most of his Palestinian peers.

Recently, he traveled into further isolation by leading an effort to teach Palestinians at universities in the West Bank about the Holocaust, which is not part of the curriculum in Palestinian schools. In addition to a series of seminars on the topic, in March he took what is thought to have been the first group of students from the Palestinian territories to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in Poland.

Referring to the trip, Mr. Dajani said in an interview, “It helped emphasize the human story of the Holocaust, to study the meaning of the historical narrative as related to our conflict, to heighten empathy, awareness, and sensitivity.”

The visit was part of a study program on conflict resolution involving students and scholars from Wasatia and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel. The program is organized by the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, in Germany, and paid for by the German Research Foundation.

Titled “Hearts of Flesh — Not Stone,” a reference to a passage in the Book of Ezekiel, the program also involves sending a group of Israeli students to a Palestinian refugee camp in Bethlehem. German doctoral students in social psychology are surveying the Israeli and the Palestinian participants to see how they react to the visits.

Al-Quds University does not officially approve Mr. Dajani’s involvement in the program, a point it emphasized after an article about the trip to Poland appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

“The university lecturer and the students involved acted in their personal capacity and were not representatives of the university,” Al-Quds University said in a statement.

Some Palestinians outright condemned the trip. Abdullah Dweikat, a local news commentator, lambasted the “pilgrimage” to Auschwitz-Birkenau. “Let us first pay attention to our martyrs and their families,” he wrote on the website for Al-Watan, a television station in Ramallah.

Students involved in the project were not immune to such thinking. Responding to peer pressure, undergraduates from Bir Zeit University opted to skip the trip as they were preparing to depart, Mr. Dajani said. Students who did go declined to comment.

Mr. Dajani said he was somewhat surprised by the anger the trip engendered.

“I find it difficult to understand why anyone would oppose such a visit since students learned much more than they would sitting in a classroom,” he said.

Yet he knew that the project was dealing with a sensitive subject for Palestinians, in part because of the misinformation that exists about the Holocaust. “The few books in Arabic about the Holocaust are tarnished with bigotry,” he said.

“People have not been able to deal with this sensitive issue because they believe it is at the core of the establishment of the state of Israel, which, in other words, is the source of the Palestinian Nakba,” he added, using the Arabic term for “catastrophe” by which Palestinians refer to the creation of the Jewish state, in 1948.

Mr. Dajani said his eagerness for Palestinian and Israeli students to learn about their historical sufferings resulted from his own journey, which he began as someone dedicated to pursuing armed struggle against the Zionist enemy.

Born in 1946, Mr. Dajani is a member of one of Jerusalem’s historic Arab clans. The honorific “Daoudi” was added to the family name after an ancestor was appointed keeper of the Tomb of King David, on Mount Zion, in medieval times. He had planned to study engineering in Lebanon, but his plans changed after the 1967 Middle East war. He was recruited into the ranks of the Fatah guerrillas, where he received military training but never fired a shot in battle. Mr. Dajani eventually became head of the organization’s English-language propaganda arm.

Banned from Jerusalem, where his family lived, because of his Fatah activities, he pursued an academic career that took him to the United States, where he acquired a Ph.D. in government from the University of South Carolina and a Ph.D. in political economy at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1993, he was teaching at a university in Jordan when his ailing father finally secured a permit from the Israelis for him to return home.

Mr. Dajani began to regard Israelis differently after he accompanied his father for cancer treatment at a hospital in Israel and also witnessed the care given to his dying mother by Israeli doctors and even soldiers.

“I became confused about my enemy, who did their best to help my father and my mother,” he said. “I started to see the other side of my enemy, which is the human side.”

The Holocaust course is not the first time he has pushed curricular boundaries. At Al-Quds University, Mr. Dajani has established the somewhat radical idea of an American-studies program. He concentrates not on the history, politics, or culture of the United States, but instead tries to teach his students “what made America become great.”

“I teach about religious freedom, about multiculturalism, pluralism,” he said. “These are things I extracted from the American experience, and these are the things that I wanted my students to learn.”

These are deeply unfashionable sentiments in a Palestinian context, where America is regarded with suspicion because of its backing for Israel, and American values are seen by many as secular Western implants alien to Arab culture and inimical to Islam.

But the only way for Palestinians to advance, Mr. Dajani said, is to acquire the skills of critical thinking and risk-taking that characterize their neighbors, and the only way to engage with Israelis is to understand their deepest fears — and vice versa.

Such thinking has earned him supporters.

“He is very unique,” said Shifra Sagy, a professor of psychology and chairwoman of the Martin-Springer Center for the Study of Conflict Management and Negotiation at Ben-Gurion University, who took the Israeli participants in the “Hearts of Flesh” program to the refugee camp. “Other Palestinians are very cautious to do such projects, especially ones that concern the Holocaust. But any cooperation now between Israeli and Palestinian academics is very difficult.”

Ultimately, Mr. Dajani said, Palestinians cannot begin to understand Israelis unless they learn about the impact of the Holocaust.

“It is my role as a professor to open the minds of my students to knowledge and to learning without any restriction or prohibition,” Mr. Dajani said. “I would like Palestinians to explore the unexplored and to meet these challenges, even though you might find that within their community there will be a lot of pressure on them not to do it.”